GIMP gets canvas rotation

Alexandre Prokoudine 21. Apr, 2013
22 Comments

Since last night unstable version of GIMP has canvas rotation. The new feature is mostly useful for digital painting and drawing, as well as for preparing textures in CG, where you need to work on parts of a picture while viewing them from a different angle.

Canvas rotation was originally prototyped by sigetch in the GIMP Painter fork which could be considered to be a playground for various new features in upstream GIMP. Here's a quick demo:

The canvas rotation mode can be activated with any currently selected tool. Just press Shift and start dragging the middle mouse button up or down. Use the additional Ctrl modifier to rotate with 15° step.

To reset the rotation either choose “View / Rotate / Reset to 0°” command in menu or use Ctrl + Shift + dragging.

Canvas rotation isn't 100% complete yet, expect further refining. The feature was implemented by Michael Natterer and is expected to be available in v2.10 (no release date estimations possible at the moment). You can also sponsor this little project.

This will be a cool addition thanks for developing it! With the current adoption rate of tablet pc’s using the shift middle mouse button may not be ideal for those users. In fact the lack of a keyboard and mouse buttons is a bit of an issue generally with many existing applications. By the time 2.10 is released the number of artists using tablets will probably be significant. There will probably also be an influx of new tablet owners looking for a cool art package which plays nice with their device. It would be cool if GIMP could meet their needs. I use a tablet plus artdock (autohotkey), which solves some of the KB short cut issues, but many programs are still cumbersome when using touch and pen technology.

Would it be possible to add a horizontal canvas flip option as part of your project?

nice feature.
I’m new to gimp. Is it possible to flip the canvas?
in matte painting is useful to flip the canvas (horizontally) from time to time, in order to see if everything looks good.
thanks in advance.

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